16 Jan 2017

DIY UI: How to create your own Notebookbar

Introduced recently with the MUFFIN concept, the Notebookbar is a blank canvas where controls can be placed and arranged freely. It offers all freedom to users who are not afraid to fiddle around with an integrated development environment (IDE). Here we explain how to start from scratch.…

30 Dec 2016

New Color Palettes in LibreOffice

A color palette is an arrangement of a limited set of colors resembling a painter’s palette. Some collections are officially standardized, others are individually assembled to serve, for instance, a branding purpose or to convey a certain mood.

Among many other things, good design means to have a limited number of colors that work well together.…

21 Dec 2016

Evolving Past the Restrictions of Toolbars

Toolbars are a common toolkit control that have been around since the dawn of GUI applications, providing direct access to an application’s most frequently used functions. But with increasing scope, the number of frequently used functions grows to an extent that can have a detrimental impact on quickly locating a particular item.…

11 Nov 2016

Additions to LibreOffice

Software in general is made for many users, one size fits none. Personal preferences have to be taken into consideration as well as different workflows with varying goals. The broader the scope the more features needs to be flexible making the product often bulky.…

21 Oct 2016

Dealing with Missing Fonts

When documents are sent from one computer to the next or opened on the same computer in a different operating system, these documents may not look the same unless all the fonts used in the document are available on the other computer or operating system.…

31 Aug 2016

Tickets on behalf of UX

The simplest way to contribute to LibreOffice is to submit bugs and enhancement requests to our bugtracker. This is also true for design and usability related issues, where up until now we had the ux-advice component that these bugs were assigned to.

12 Aug 2016

Insert and Playback of Online Media

Gone are the days when users were limited to embedding local media and clip art bundled with an office suite, as we now live at a time where there is a plethora of online media at a user’s fingertips, so an office suite should make it easy for its users to add them to their documents.…

31 Jul 2016

How the Navigator may support object handling in LibreOffice Draw

The management of various objects is crucial for LibreOffice Draw, especially when a drawing or a diagram becomes complex with a lot of shapes and groups placed on different layers with an elaborated stack order.

Improvements for the handling of layers was not only requested in the survey about Draw, but is also evident in the enhancement requests at the LibreOffice bug tracker.…

17 Jun 2016

Easyhackers wanted!

LibreOffice is a community-driven product, meaning you don’t only help the development by filing bug reports and writing ideas for features. You can do even more. Quite a few of the tickets in the bug tracker have been identified as EASYHACKS, simple tasks that can be solved by people who want to start coding, or already have some experience.…

9 May 2016

Welcome, GSoC’16 students!

Every year Google runs a Summer of Code (GSoC) and as with every year, The Document Foundation is one of the major participating open source organizations. From a total of 91 proposals, 11 have been accepted this year and we are happy to announce five projects that aim to improve usability.…